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New railway threatens Nairobi’s unique urban wildlife park

James Morgan/Getty

By Debora MacKenzie in Nairobi, Kenya

The rhinoceros stands in the tall grass, as oblivious to our vehicle as he is to the soaring city skyline just a few kilometres away. I am on a mini-safari to Nairobi National Park, the only nature reserve in the world within the boundaries of a capital city.

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But his refuge is threatened by plans to build a major railway through the park. Although local conservationists are fighting it, the scheme is another instance of an insidious trend worldwide for protected areas to be whittled away.

Kenya values its wildlife: tourists who flock to see it provide a tenth of its GDP. Not far from our rhino, blackened earth marks the spot where last April, Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta torched more than a hundred tonnes of elephant ivory and rhino horn seized from poachers.

Although it covers just 12,000 hectares, Nairobi National Park does its bit for conservation. It is one of only two Kenyan parks that export young black rhinos to other parks.

Reuters/Thomas Mukoya

In the course of my day I see lions finishing off a hapless zebra, an ostrich couple shepherding two tall, fuzzy offspring and a little serval on a rare daytime hunt. I also see almost a dozen different large herbivores, at least two dozen spectacular bird species, a scattering of other battered vehicles full of starry-eyed tourists – and staff of the Kenya Wildlife Service, who heroically jacked my guide’s Land Cruiser out of the late rainy-season mud. Twice.

Now the China Road and Bridge Corporation is replacing Kenya’s narrow, colonial-era rail line with a Standard Gauge Railway to funnel freight and passengers between the African interior and the port of Mombasa. The line from the coast has reached the Nairobi terminal southeast of the city. It must now head west to meet the line from Uganda.

Last year Kenya Railways said it would cost too much to appropriate built-up urban land in the south of the city for the new line. Instead it released plans to build the line through the park, in a large loop to take account of gradients. To level the track further, some of it would be elevated on pillars up to 40 metres tall.

Conservationists charged that the route means losing or cutting off 90 hectares from the park. They also argued that construction and earth-moving work would occupy far more space and drive animals off, while giraffes and rhinos wouldn’t use passages under the tracks.

And not all of the proposed line through the park can be raised on pillars, says Steve Itela, head of an alliance of Kenyan conservation groups. “Sections on the ground will certainly affect wildlife habitats and wetlands,” he says, including dams that provide wildlife with important access to water.

The plan was rejected again at a public consultation last December, says Itela. Further public consultations for the plan were then cancelled. Residents outside the park affected by the plan have launched a court case to protest the appropriation of their land, to start this month.

Itela’s group has presented an alternative route south of the park, where he says both gradients and the local, rural residents are favourable.

Kenya’s environment ministry has also come out against building in the park, and have said a new plan will be proposed. But so far, says Itela, there is no sign of one.

The Kenyan government announced in June that the entire line would be finished early, by next March. That leaves little time for the public consultations required for any new plan.

The park can ill afford more pressure. It has an electric fence on three sides and a river to the south. It is now surrounded by built-up areas. Zebra and lions migrate south with the rains through the factories and warehouses of an export processing zone.

A ranger guarding the park gate with an AK-15 assault rifle looks sad when I ask her about the proposed rail line. “They should not build it here. The animals have little enough space.”

But in a final complication, Kenya is in the run-up to general elections which have already seen violent clashes between rival factions. The government is courting voters and backers, not conservationists – or rhinos.